Author
Topic: Nicot System (Read 5390 times)

Greywulff

I've only 3 hive's which 1 has an excellent Queen, where buy the workers are extremely quite and are very good foragers.

Never tried Queen Rearing before so going to give it ago next season to increase my stock of bee's over the next few years to 15 hive's. Well that's the plan anyway.

Done a good bit of reading but it isn't the same as getting first hand advice from someone whose has used them before. My main Q. is: After transferring the egg/cup into the holder in the frame why do you need a cell starter hive and cell finisher hive or have I just picked it up wrong.

Would a Queen-less hive not start and finish the cells? as I was thinking that i could nuc 4 frames of bee's/brood to do this job for me.

I've only 3 hive's which 1 has an excellent Queen, where buy the workers are extremely quite and are very good foragers.

Never tried Queen Rearing before so going to give it ago next season to increase my stock of bee's over the next few years to 15 hive's. Well that's the plan anyway.

Done a good bit of reading but it isn't the same as getting first hand advice from someone whose has used them before. My main Q. is: After transferring the egg/cup into the holder in the frame why do you need a cell starter hive and cell finisher hive or have I just picked it up wrong.

Would a Queen-less hive not start and finish the cells? as I was thinking that i could nuc 4 frames of bee's/brood to do this job for me.

Am I mad........or just not long enough at this....

Using a cloake board, the same hive can be used as the cell starter and cell finisher. To make quality cells, you need a large population of bees, so I would not recommend a nuc.

Greywulff

Thanks for the replies, interesting system there Robo, I'll have to re-think the whole nuc starter/finisher and opt for one of my full hives. Only interseted in this system as I feal you cannot do the bee's juctice without having queens availible to re-queen and to increaes my stock of bee's.

I payed €300 odd for 3 nuc's of bee's here in Ireland and you won't buy them now for anything less than €120 and can pay up to :shock:€150 :shock: for a good nuc. So you can see where I'm coming from when I say I'd like to get a handle on queen rearing for myself.

>Is this to do with the quantity of queen cells verses bee's or maybe not to stress one hive out by making them over work starting/finishing alot of cells?

When you are queen rearing in quantity you do one batch after another. Separating the starting and finishing allows some systems to make more batches before the starter burns out from being queenless. Usually when doing this it is a queenless starter and a queenright finisher.

>Is there a ratio for bee's/frames to cells?

A starter should be literally overflowing with bees. Any less will have much less cells built.

Density is as much an issue as frames of bees. Eight frames of bees packed in a five frame nuc (by shaking in the last three) will start more cells than eight frames of bees in a ten frame box. Assuming a maximum density of bees, I can get about five nice cells from two medium depth Langstroth frames of bees. I can get about 20 or 30 from a three or four box hive packed with bees, or a starter hive (swarm box) packed with bees.

Greywulff

There are some wonderful Queen rearing video's available that were made in Germany. Hopefully the link is posted on this site. Lot's of info on different cell starters, finishers, etc... Pick the one that looks like it would work for you, or try them all. Watch them all winter so you get an understanding about the process and what to expect. Try multiple batches until midsummer. Compare results. Keep at it.

M.B. on your Queen Rearing Calendar you have the cells put into the queenless starter and then capped on day 8, then on day 14 you put them in the mating nucs. If you were using a finisher or a Cloake board at what point do you do that? After they are capped?

I've been wondering the same thing as GrayWulf, but after reading this thread I get it - you want to get the use out of the queenless starter as efficiently as possible.

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"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Samuel Clemens

>M.B. on your Queen Rearing Calendar you have the cells put into the queenless starter and then capped on day 8, then on day 14 you put them in the mating nucs. If you were using a finisher or a Cloake board at what point do you do that? After they are capped?

Yes. After they are capped is when I would open it up to a queen right finisher or move them to a finisher.

>I've been wondering the same thing as GrayWulf, but after reading this thread I get it - you want to get the use out of the queenless starter as efficiently as possible.